Transplanting woes, please help

[y-man]

Hi everyone,

I have a home-built box at home, and an old laptop at my other home away,
which is where I am now.

I had taken a full copy of my Mint 20.2 root partition, as well as
copies of relevant /home directories into a portable USB disk.

My plan was
- place a copy of Mint 20.2 root in an empty partition in my laptop,
- add relevant /home directories in /home partition of the laptop
- do the required adjustments in /etc/fstab
- boot to Mint 20.2 in the laptop from Grub command line
- if all went well, do the update-grup;grub-install part

This plan failed at fourth step. Linux Mint title over four dots with
rotating colors is the last bit I am familiar. After that I end up
with initramfs prompt.

There I see a very initial state of "/", /dev, /run, /proc all empty; df lists only those
/etc/fstab exists, but empty

I don't know how I can investigate the problem from here.

Any ideas will be much appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Moem]

This is what I would do:
- Make a spare copy (backup) of your old /home just in case.
- Boot the machine from a bootable USB stick that contains your Mint version of choice.
- Start the installer, choosing the Something Else method.
- Assign / to root and format it.
- Assign /home to home and DO NOT format it.
- Let the installer do its job. Reboot.
- Reinstall your software and it will find the settings that were kept in /home.

But there may be a simpler method.

[SMG]

I had taken a full copy of my Mint 20.2 root partition, as well as
copies of relevant /home directories into a portable USB disk.

My plan was
- place a copy of Mint 20.2 root in an empty partition in my laptop,
- add relevant /home directories in /home partition of the laptop
- do the required adjustments in /etc/fstab
- boot to Mint 20.2 in the laptop from Grub command line
- if all went well, do the update-grup;grub-install part

This plan failed at fourth step. Linux Mint title over four dots with
rotating colors is the last bit I am familiar. After that I end up
with initramfs prompt.

What was on the laptop besides its empty partition?
I presume the empty partition was formatted EXT4 before you began copying.
Is there already a boot partition on the laptop?
Is the laptop Legacy BIOS or EFI?

[y-man]

This is what I would do:
- Make a spare copy (backup) of your old /home just in case.
- Boot the machine from a bootable USB stick that contains your Mint version of choice.
- Start the installer, choosing the Something Else method.
- Assign / to root and format it.
- Assign /home to home and DO NOT format it.
- Let the installer do its job. Reboot.
- Reinstall your software and it will find the settings that were kept in /home.

But there may be a simpler method.

Thanks, but I do not have a bootable USB stick, instead I have a portable USB drive, which in the process of my efforts explained above I did make bootable. But still attempting to boot off that portable disk or off from its duplicate on the laptops internal drive I run into the same problem.

I do not want to start with a fresh install, because that way I would lose all my extra programs I added over the period of my past usage of desktop system.

In the past I had successfully transplanted one system as I described in the OP, but Mint 20 should have some new stuff that make this process impossible.

In future, I will bring an install DVD, and try to grow freshly installed system to the level of my source system, may be some rsync ing of relevant directories in /usr from my source system's /usr.

[y-man]

What was on the laptop besides its empty partition?
I presume the empty partition was formatted EXT4 before you began copying.
Is there already a boot partition on the laptop?
Is the laptop Legacy BIOS or EFI?

Thanks for your interest. My answers to your questions follow,

Last time I used this laptop was Feb 20 as a Mint 19.3 system.
Its disk originally was all one Win partition. I squeezed it to a small size and partitioned the rest to use for linux:
one for linux swap, two for linux root, and one for linux /home. All linux partitions are ext4.
It has no boot partition, and it's a pre-EFI laptop.

[SMG]

Last time I used this laptop was Feb 20 as a Mint 19.3 system.

You were wanting to, in essence, replace your LM19.3 install with an LM20.2 install.

Its disk originally was all one Win partition. I squeezed it to a small size and partitioned the rest to use for linux:
one for linux swap, two for linux root, and one for linux /home. All linux partitions are ext4.

Before you arrived on this trip, your laptop had

• an EXT4 partition for swap
• one EXT4 partition which was root for LM19.3
• one empty EXT4 partition where you wanted to place the LM20.2 root partition
• one home partition which was for LM19.3.

Is that accurate?

It has no boot partition, and it's a pre-EFI laptop.

It is possible to not have a specified boot partition, but there must be a location for the boot loader on the disk. If you were not using the Windows bootloader to boot Windows and LM19.3, then there must have been a boot-loader on the disk for you to be able to boot LM19.3.

I have copied the steps of your plan and then put my understanding under each step. Please let us know if my understanding is correct.

• place a copy of Mint 20.2 root in an empty partition in my laptop
  • You would manually copy the files and directories in the root partition from your portable usb drive to the empty partition on the laptop's drive.
• add relevant /home directories in /home partition of the laptop
  • Copy some of the directories from LM20.2 home into LM19.3 home partition.
• do the required adjustments in /etc/fstab
  • Adjust fstab so the root partition for the current LM19.3 install was now using the "new" LM20.2 root partition, but leave the other partitions the same.
• boot to Mint 20.2 in the laptop from Grub command line
  • Sorry, I do not understand what this means. I would think the current boot-loader on the laptop drive would be pointing to grub in the LM19.3 root partition and because LM20.2 was not installed on this disk, there would not be an entry in grub menu for LM20.2 (only for LM19.3). There are others who understand bootloading better than I do, so I could my understanding may not be correct.
  • It may be possible to add the LM20.2 install to the grub menu, but my limited understanding of the process leads me to believe an install usb with the program to fix grub would be needed.
• if all went well, do the update-grup;grub-install part

We'll have to see if others with a better understanding of the boot-loading process can help.

[pbear]

I agree with SMG, what you really need for this job is a bootable USB drive which will bring up a live session. You could have done this computer-to-computer. For comparison, here's a write-up of how I did something similar to your transplant. Also, for what it's worth, my tutorial on installing Grub. At this point, though, I think you need a live session.

How difficult would it be to get Mint onto a flash drive? Is there anyone nearby with a computer?

[y-man]

I add some clarification in line where needed

You were wanting to, in essence, replace your LM19.3 install with an LM20.2 install.

No, I wanted to keep LM19.3, while adding LM20.2

Before you arrived on this trip, your laptop had

• an EXT4 partition for swap
• one EXT4 partition which was root for LM19.3
• one empty EXT4 partition where you wanted to place the LM20.2 root partition
• one home partition which was for LM19.3.

Is that accurate?

Yes.

It is possible to not have a specified boot partition, but there must be a location for the boot loader on the disk. If you were not using the Windows bootloader to boot Windows and LM19.3, then there must have been a boot-loader on the disk for you to be able to boot LM19.3.

Yes, LM19.3 root partition has a full /boot; I did update-grub and grub=install; my new LM20.2 is listed in the Grub screen that comes up at boot

I have copied the steps of your plan and then put my understanding under each step. Please let us know if my understanding is correct.

• place a copy of Mint 20.2 root in an empty partition in my laptop
  • You would manually copy the files and directories in the root partition from your portable usb drive to the empty partition on the laptop's drive.

Yes

[*]add relevant /home directories in /home partition of the laptop

• Copy some of the directories from LM20.2 home into LM19.3 home partition.

Yes

[*]do the required adjustments in /etc/fstab

• Adjust fstab so the root partition for the current LM19.3 install was now using the "new" LM20.2 root partition, but leave the other partitions the
  same.

No. I left LM19.3 root partition alone, I did the adjustments in /etc/fstab of LM20.2 root partition

[mikeflan]

While the methods above can be made to work, I find it much easier to take whole disk images of the drive with the OS partition on it and restore the whole thing when needed.

[SMG]

No, I wanted to keep LM19.3, while adding LM20.2

The Linux Mint desktop files are in hidden directories in /home. It is not really advised to have two different operating systems using the same home partition. That is likely to cause problems.

[y-man]

The Linux Mint desktop files are in hidden directories in /home. It is not really advised to have two different operating systems using the same home partition. That is likely to cause problems.

I am a Mint Linux user of Mate conviction, and there is no file nor directory under /home which have always been a partition in my systems.

Code: Select all

ym19@istLaptop:/home/ym20_2$ ls -a /home
./  ../  lost+found/  yavuz/  ym19/   ym20_2/

[SMG]

The Linux Mint desktop files are in hidden directories in /home. It is not really advised to have two different operating systems using the same home partition. That is likely to cause problems.

I am a Mint Linux user of Mate conviction, and there is no file nor directory under /home which have always been a partition in my systems.

Code: Select all

ym19@istLaptop:/home/ym20_2$ ls -a /home
./  ../  lost+found/  yavuz/  ym19/   ym20_2/

I'm sorry, but I do not understand your statement. I indicated there are hidden directories under /home.